A collaborative project between the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford looked at the significance of blood sugar levels in the first years after diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. Scientists found that diabetics benefit from getting control of their blood sugar fast, much more so than we previously thought. Targeting an HbA1c of…
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I read a study the other day that showed that two out of every five Americans who die from covid-19 are diabetic. It makes diabetes one of the highest risk conditions in the pandemic. It’s sobering that while only 10% of the US population suffers from diabetes, 40% of covid-death cases are connected with the…
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While reading an article about the link between diabetes and dementia – which apparently doubles in type 2 diabetics – I came across something interesting in Life’s Simple 7. It’s a list of seven steps that you can take to improve cardiovascular health recommended by the American Heart Association. They sound like a good idea…
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I’m taking a summer course in dystopian fiction. This week we’re reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which annoys me no end. It presents organ transplants as a route to life extension in a near-future England, where human clones serve as the donors. The problem I have with the novel is that it disregards…
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A recent study from the American Society for Nutrition found no association between eating red meat and the risk of early death, cancer, stroke, or heart disease. The study was quite large, with 134,297 individuals from low-, middle-, and high-income countries participating. In total, there were 7,789 deaths during a nine-and-a-half-year period. While there was…
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Last month I ate the same things, a cheese omelette for breakfast and chicken salad for dinner, pretty much every day. I just found out there’s a name for this – the Groundhog Day diet. Followers eat the same meals every day, and it’s popular with countless celebrities. Victoria Beckham has a piece of salmon…
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I just finished The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo, a scientific look at how we eat. Longo is a research biologist at USC Davis School of Gerontology, where he developed the fasting-mimicking-diet (FMD). It’s one of the topics of his books, along with what to eat to live longer and other potential routes to life…
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One of the fears I had as a newly diagnosed diabetic was that I would go to sleep and not wake up again. It is known as dead in bed syndrome, where you go to bed fine, but then they find you dead in the morning. The reasons why it happens are unclear. Scientists speculate…
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Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. I’ve read three of his books and recently started listening to his podcast series Revisionist History. During season 2, there’s a thought-provoking episode called McDonald’s Broke My Heart. It tells the story of multi-millionaire businessman Phil Sokolof. In the 1960s, at the age of 43, he had a heart…
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When you’re diagnosed with diabetes, there’s a lot of new terminology. What’s the difference between basal and bolus insulin? Why do we need continuous glucose monitoring? Which is the best app for carb counting? You end up with more questions than answers. For me, the most confusing thing was HbA1c. When I went for my…
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